The RII application was the centerpiece of our presentation. Talked for a
bit then I invited someone from the audience, Maureen, to try the RII (I
didn't know her and she knew nothing of the application... another person--a
blind person--we had lined up for the demo became sick the day before).

Maureen started the application, with headphones on, while I introduced the
local OVC team members. After a while, we plugged in the speakers so the
audience could hear the prompts (Cory Hamma recordings). She continued
while we took questions from the audience. When she finished, I asked her
about in front of the audience and she raved about it (big smile)! Then we
proceeded to the ballot verification system (BVA) and she responded
positively (I swiped the barcode with the ballot in the privacy folder).

We continued with questions and answers for a long time since I really
didn't want to have the audience poking around too much with our still
fragile software. The strategy worked very well. The stuff we showed them
worked flawlessly so by the time we let the audience come and look more
closely, they already thought it was great.

> There is an article on e-voting in SIAM News (Society for Industrial
> and Applied Mathematics) by Sara Robinson, a freelance writer from
> Pasadena, CA. The article is quite long - it goes over three large
> pages (filled to about 50-80%). It looks very good to me ...
>
Good.

> (aside from not mentioning the OVC). .....
>
Not good--they just aren't with it apparently. Our project needs to be
mentioned from now on in these discussions. Yesterday was a real
breakthrough for us. I confirmed that we got some coverage in the APR 1 New
York Times (I got a couple of phone calls today from people that had read
it). The NYT article was a small blurb in the Business Section. I am
looking for a paper copy of it so I can scan it.

> It covers several things, like the scrapped
> SERVE project, HAVA, the Caltech/MIT project, the Hopkins report, the
> Raba report, Rebecca Mercuri's method, the Frog method, Chaum's ....
>
David Chaum attended the demo yesterday and joined us for lunch.

> ... and Neff's methods. Douglas Jones is, of course, also mentioned
> in several places in the article.
>
Thanks again, Jan.

Alan D.
==================================================================
= The content of this message, with the exception of any external
= quotations under fair use, are released to the Public Domain
==================================================================
Received on Fri Apr 30 23:17:01 2004